Saturday, July 02, 2016

IMPORTANT! Edwin Dyga's brilliant article on the capitulation of American political conservatism & why the Left rules the rhetorical battlefield

CONSERVATISM’S “UNFORTUNATE REFORMATION”Why the Left Rules the Rhetorical BattlefieldBy Edwin Dyga June 2016

Earlier this year, popular talk-show host Rush
Limbaugh declared that “nationalism and populism have overtaken
conservatism in terms of appeal.” Though he retreated from these
comments a few days later, saying, “I do not believe nationalism and
populism have usurped conservatism,” the damage was done: A onetime
neoconservative apologist not only implied the end of establishment
conservatism as a viable political force capable of confronting the
uncertainties of globalized modernity, but he cited a paleoconservative
commentator, Sam Francis, as an authority in explaining the continued
popularity of prospective Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump.

Conservatism, like contemporary Western civilization itself, seems to be
in eclipse. But this is so only because its advocates cannot, or refuse
to, speak on their own terms; instead, they accept the moral authority
of leftist ideologues and thus handicap their own putative opposition to
militant progressivism. Those on the so-called Dissident Right
constantly remind their detractors that the present stewards of
mainstream conservatism have repudiated their forefather’s legacy. These
warnings are, however, almost universally dismissed in terms identical
to the broader Left’s pejorative treatment of conservatism itself.
Instead, mainstream conservatives declare that their fealty to liberal
ends is more sincere than that of their explicitly leftist opponents.
While it is easier to identify these trends in the more theatrical
political culture of the United States, the moral bankruptcy of
establishment conservatives can be found in Center-Right parties
throughout the Anglosphere. An example from Australia illustrates that
the nearly universal assumption of leftist morality may have thrust
conservative thought over the event-horizon, beyond which it is
conceptually indistinguishable from the progressive worldview.

+++

“Tony Abbott just called for both a Reformation and a revolution ‘within
Islam.’” So writes Waleed Aly, a Muslim-Australian spokesman on
multicultural affairs and lecturer of politics at Monash University (Sydney Morning Herald,
Dec. 10, 2015). Former Prime Minister Abbott delivered his comments,
which largely echoed a similar call by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, during a
discussion concerning the compatibility of Islamic culture and modern
Western society. Anglo multiculturalists, who believe almost religiously
in the inviolable sovereignty of all cultures but their own, were quick
to attack Abbott for his offensively “Eurocentric” faux pas and
the neocolonial temerity with which he dared to lecture “the Other.” Yet
this was no ordinary example of xenophiles pillorying a public figure
for offending contemporary progressive sensibilities on cultural
identity and religion. Abbott’s comments, as well as the predictable
reactions to them, showed that both sides of the culture war have
engaged on the Left’s chosen field of rhetorical battle.

Contra Abbott, Waleed Aly explains that Islam already underwent a
“reformation” in the tenth century, when the jurisprudential doctrines
of Ijtihad and Istihsan (independent and preferential reasoning, respectively) were eclipsed by Taqlid
(blind obedience to scripture). Moreover, Aly intimates that this was
historically antecedent to Islam’s present difficulty in facing a world
defined by a post-Christian secular ideology, its technocratic and
managerial theory of governance, and the liberal, universalist biases
that accompany it. From Wahhabism to the foundation of the modern state
of Saudi Arabia, from anti-colonial Islamism to contemporary
manifestations of international jihad and the so-called Islamic
State — by illustrating the continuity of these developments as a
function of this supposed reformation, Aly reveals the ultimate folly of
applying Western concepts to the historical experience of foreign
cultures and the silliness of expecting similar sociological outcomes as
a result. “This is, of course, perhaps the most well-worn and
ill-informed cliché of Western discourse on Islam,” he writes. “The kind
of thing people like to say when they want to sound serious but know
almost exactly nothing about Islam, Muslim societies, or indeed the
[Protestant] Reformation.”

Abbott might have retorted by conceding his infelicitous choice of terminology, that what Islam actually requires — his intended meaning — is, therefore, a counter-reformation.
Nevertheless, many Muslim faithful might interpret such a qualification
as a call for the fundamental rejection of Islam itself. As Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an put it, “Islam is Islam and that’s it” (Milliyet,
Aug. 21, 2007). A Western politician enamored of nominalist theories of
citizenship is incapable of appreciating the sincerity with which such
absolutist beliefs can be held. This is so even in a democratic culture
where secular openness and the egalitarian, indiscriminate accommodation
to all have become the de facto civic religion. Either way, the existential crisis plaguing the West, coupled with the fundamental otherness
of Mohammedanism and its associated cultural practices, only
underscores the impracticality, or even likelihood, of compromise in
favor of either camp.

Abbott’s awkward foray into this debate illustrates a mindset almost
identical to the secular liberal’s. The latter feels he is capable of
declaiming what Islam really is, or ought to be — namely, a
“religion of peace,” inherently humanitarian, tolerant, rational, and
scientific. It is “betrayed” by its violent jihadi adherents who,
despite their vehement claims to the contrary, have “nothing to do” with
the explicit dictates of Mohammed or the unambiguous and disconcerting
Koranic mandates regarding the treatment of, and relations with, kufars and dhimmis.
Abbott’s call for a reformation within Islam likewise takes as a given
the progressive, materialist, and therefore universal and egalitarian
perspective wherefrom all cultures will, can, and must undergo the exact same historical development
as they move toward globalized modernity. According to this view, any
reluctance on their part is merely a failure to progress along an
inevitable path toward a world where, as recent history has shown, the
only belief system that merits public celebration is one centered on
secular, technocratic, and scientific “values.”

+++

In recent decades, neoconservatives and other liberal
internationalists have exerted a great deal of energy in trying to
correct the third world’s apparent reluctance to mimic modernist
first-world conceits, and the fruit of their efforts has today
metastasized across Afro-Arabia and its colonial proxies in Western
Europe. While freedom may be universally desired, the manner in which it
is experienced is a function of culture, which itself is a particular
interpretation of the transcendent. This interpretation is likely to be
very different in Berlin or Baghdad, London or Lahore, Kraków or
Karakorum. Abbott’s and the secular liberal’s underlying mindset leads
to the same place because they are both motivated by an inability or
unwillingness to recognize core and perhaps irreconcilable differences
between cultures that introduce diametrically opposed ethical norms into
the multicultural state. Furthermore, both appear equally dedicated to a
state that is, by definition, a repudiation of traditional Western
norms. This is the crisis that Europe now faces, with little evidence
that its political class has any understanding or desire to avert the
pending catastrophe. So pervasive is this bias in favor of a liberal
view of rationalist, linear progress that even an outspoken conservative
Catholic like Abbott falls victim to its assumptions and advocates an
essentially Protestant, Jacobin historiography as a solution to the
fundamentalism of an alien religious creed ensconced in Western lands.

To put it differently, the egalitarian, sentimentalist, and
progressive utopia of the Left is equally as arrogant and dangerous as
the no less egalitarian, rationalist, and determinist worldview
of the contemporary Right. Thus, far from distinguishing himself from
his ardent detractors, Abbott’s politics have actually reinforced some of the more corrosive aspects of the liberal status quo. As a result, the bipartisan consensus of liberals and faux-conservatives
on the chimera of “progress” — as well as its logical policy outcomes —
begets a society characterized by the vulnerabilities of its weakest
members. Both have led to the inversion of the cultural structures that
nourished Western civilization for millennia, consequentially neutering
its defensive instincts. Consider the following two examples, in which a
failed appreciation for cultural particularism, coupled with a naïve,
hyper-individualist ideology, has created the unprecedented conditions
for a disaster within Western lands.

The ongoing rapes of over fourteen hundred Western girls who were
forced into prostitution by Pakistani Muslims in the housing estates of
Rotherham, England, over a sixteen-year period, and the rampant sexual
assaults on Western women by Muslim refugees in the streets of Cologne
and other European capitals on New Year’s Eve, illustrate the brutal
clash of two incompatible and uncompromising worlds. One is
characterized by virile self-assertion, the other by feminine
acquiescence. The result is that twenty-first-century female
narcissistic solipsism has been thrust into the embrace of atavistic
Afro-Arab male barbarism; only here the politics of the victim has set
the stage for her victimhood. If we are to treat the dialectics of
multicultural “smash-the-patriarchy” feminism seriously, then the brave
new world it is ushering in will end rapidly, not with a bang or a
whimper, but with a muffled scream. Diversity has not brought “strength”
but taharrush into the heartland of Gothic Europe and the pimping of underage dhimmi
girls in plain sight of “IngSoc” Aldermen. The die has been cast, the
Rubicon is crossed; one moral paradigm replaces another. A world without
White Christian Patriarchy becomes a Daesh slave market. Yet the
only solution either wing of the mainstream political spectrum is able
to conceive of is a recommitment to commonly held
egalitarian-rationalist conceits, applied universally, and globally.

+++

Waleed Aly’s mockery of Tony Abbott’s reformation-advocacy is,
therefore, partly justified. Aly is also correct in identifying
establishment conservatism’s defects as a shallow commitment to the
banal, which has cultivated a political rhetoric that, he writes, “has
no traditional moral language; nothing that richly evokes concepts like
empathy, courage, sacrifice, restraint, forgiveness, forbearance,
humility.” The traditionalist might respond that, naturally, this is
what happens when politics is replaced by a series of economic
propositions whose fungible treatment of man differs from socialism only
in nuance, emphasis, and degree — exactly the materialist reductionism
that characterizes most Center-Right politics throughout the
English-speaking world today. Ironically, the antithesis of conservatism has now come to define
it, and Aly is certainly aware of its “slow-motion death” within a
“hollowed out culture” when he writes that “it’s hard to believe the
market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will
tolerate — sex, culture, children — and yet pretend we are bound
together by inviolable, sacred values” (Sydney Morning Herald, Mar. 4, 2016). However, many of Aly’s above-mentioned virtues are expressed in communities that share strong organic
bonds and, therefore, have high levels of in-group trust and
solidarity. Government policies in the post-World War II era have
favored a hyper-individualist and subscriptive model of citizenship, but
the underlying transnationalist ideology involves a push toward
deregulated international labor markets that are facilitated by a
concurrent push toward effectively borderless mass migration, as well as
the resulting consumerism, alienation, and societal balkanization that
these entail.

Should a government assume a more genuinely communitarian
sense of public policy — one firmly based on the imperative to maintain
its constituents’ cultural and historical legacy — the result would be a
reassertion of a particularly Occidental polis from which Aly and his co-religionists would, logically, have to be excluded.
To put it differently, where conservatism loses its own sense of
cultural particularism, it ceases to be preservationist in any
meaningful sense; hence its usurpation by populism and nationalism
within a disaffected lower middle class, just as Sam Francis predicted
over two decades ago (Chronicles, March 1996). Aly therefore
correctly states that Abbott’s politics are “inaccurately” described as
conservative. He also rightly decries the inability of conservatism
(such as it presently is) to provide “some kind of cultural consensus
that can bind society.” Thus, he concludes, “self-described conservative
politics cannot offer even that anymore;…it simply cannot tap into a
positive register. It’s as though it has forgotten itself. As though it
has suffered through its own unfortunate Reformation.”

Here Aly unwittingly gets at the very root of the problem. What is
noteworthy is that Aly, a commentator of the Left who still harbors
notions of community, would echo a paleoconservative critique of today’s
uprooted, abstractionist, and decontextualized faux-Right. Yet,
should his observations be taken to heart by the establishment, Aly
would undoubtedly be horrified by the results. This is because
multiculturalism per se militates against the formation of a
“cultural consensus” that can “bind society,” unless that consensus is
based on deracinated, ahistorical abstracts — in other words, unless all
political dispositions on the Right, however defined, surrender to the
essential worldview and value systems of contemporary cultural Marxism.
That Center-Right politicians today celebrate subscription identity and
civic patriotism as the foundational principles of the modern state
indicates that such a capitulation has already occurred. Unfortunately,
such a “cultural consensus” is as enigmatic as the workers’ paradise of
the Old Marxist Left. Like Soviet economics, it simply does not work,
and it is Europe again (this time west of the Oder-Neiße Line) that will
reap the bitter fruit of this latest attempt at re-engineering man and
society according to the dictates of spiritually dislocated, utopian
malcontents.

Paleoconservatives do indeed recall that Anglo conservatism has
undergone “its own unfortunate Reformation.” In the U.S. this is
frequently attested to in the work of political theorists such as Paul
Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, Pat Buchanan, and others. In the U.K. it is
apparent in the mainstream’s contemptuous treatment of the legacy of
Conservative politician Enoch Powell, which is astonishing in light of
recent events on the Continent, as well as the continued de-legitimation
of Nigel Farage by so-called patriotic Tories such as Dan Hannan.
Australian conservatism, too, is not immune to this curse, as
exemplified by the relative isolation of Senator Cory Bernardi from the
mechanisms of government. A common feature of these politicians and
theorists is that they appeal to ideas that were once common to
conservative political theory but which large sections of the public
feel has been ignored by modern parliamentary elites. In essence, this
“unfortunate Reformation” of conservatism involves the continual
redefinition of rightist political theory according to its ostensible
opponent’s criteria for good governance. The de facto bipartisan
concordat on issues such as multiculturalism, feminism, and minority
identity politics is the clearest evidence of this sublimation of
rightist theory by leftist theology. The Right has indeed “forgotten
itself” because it has voluntarily repudiated itself by denying
its cultural and literary heritage and ostracizing those who remain
vociferously faithful to it. The resulting attempt to avoid or mitigate
accusations of anachronism, nativism, and bigotry has rendered what
passes for the political Right today irrelevant in the national
conversation.

+++

Unable or unwilling to take his observations to their logical
conclusion, Aly alludes that conservatives’ amnesia is self-inflicted
but fails to ask why this is so. In essence, he identifies the vacuity
of modern conservatism but shows no genuine sympathy for any program or
movement to rediscover what has been lost. Diametric alternatives to the
cultural Left are, he writes, simply “the politics of hairy chests,”
which “gives the finger to the niceties of postmodern society [and]
holds the full range of shadowy threats at bay — from Muslims to the PC
brigade.” In an environment where loyalty to one’s own is thus
stigmatized, or where a return to a traditional order is denounced as
the veiled authoritarianism of demagogues-in-waiting, it is no wonder
that a populist counterculture “cannot tap into a positive register” or
that the advocates of establishment conservatism will view all cultural
traditions as broadly interchangeable, so long as their outward
eccentricities are subject to a secular liberal framework. Both are
victims of the progressive stranglehold on public discourse — the former
by way of its deracinating effect on traditional notions of identity,
which creates a vacuum too easily filled by political atavism; the
latter through the operation of politically correct gag phrases and a
culture of coercive self-censorship, which leads to conformity with the
broader Left. Apparent threats to one’s nation or community, therefore,
cannot be met with a positive assertion of the good that resides in the
history of a particular people because nothing substantive can be
asserted about that people outside the conceits of the modern
social-democratic state — i.e., outside an order that embodies and
promulgates the progressive ideological experiment that would ordinarily
be anathema to conservative political theory.

By rejecting the cultural particularism that informed the
disposition of the Old Right, its prodigal descendent, therefore, is
condemned to aimlessly meander the political landscape, intellectually
ill-equipped to appreciate just how lost it truly is. Ironically, it
took a man of the multicultural, progressive Left to point it out, even
if incompletely or disingenuously. Nevertheless, Aly is as much a part
of the problem as the mainstream politicians he criticizes, those who
remain committed to the misguided belief that they have reached the “end
of history” and somehow inherited a messianic duty to drag the rest of
the world along with them into a future that seems increasingly
unworkable with each passing month. Whereas at one time
counter-revolutionaries reacted against the utopian hubris of Jacobin agitators, today the self-described opponents of leftism have actually embraced it.

Aly has at least been consistent in his misconceptions about the
solution to the crisis of Occidental rightist thought. After calling for
“new ways of forging social unity” in the Australian journal Quarterly Essay
(issue 37; 2010), he contradicts himself by suggesting that
conservatism has become “less reactionary and more principled.” It does
not seem to have occurred to Aly that reaction — in the M.E.
Bradfordian sense, or informed by the work of Latin Catholic
counter-revolutionaries Donoso Cortés, Gómez Dávila, or Corrêa de
Oliveira — might be essential to this reconnection to principle.
Tony Abbott, therefore, has it backward: It is modern conservatism that
needs to undergo a counter-reformation, assuming it wants to be relevant
as a viable force for national restoration into the twenty-first
century. But if false prophets such as Waleed Aly are permitted to set
its course, it is doomed to continue down the spiral of political and
cultural oblivion, which remains its present course.

Edwin Dyga studied Islamic Law at the University of Technology in
Sydney, Australia. He is the Convenor of the Sydney Traditionalist
Forum. The foregoing article, "Why the Left Rules the Rhetorical Battlefield," was originally published in the June 2016 issue of theNew Oxford Reviewand is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

3 comments:

le bourgeosie gentilhomme
said...

Modernism has polluted political and cultural conservatism just as it has Catholicism. There is no neo-Catholicism and no neo-conservatism. There is no paleoconservatism -- only conservatism and its cobra-mongoose nemesis, socialism, sometimes euphemistically called liberalism. So in the Church there is no traditional Catholicism -- only Catholicism and its cobra-mongoose nemesis, heresy, sometimes euphemistically called post-V2 Catholicism.

It is a measure of modernism's success that we believe we cannot maintain cogency without referring to the prefixes it has manufactured for us. Or is its greater success that we have become too inhibited and cowardly and candy-assed to call a thing by its proper name for fear of "offending" some moron or other?

Haven't read the whole thing yet, too much going on what with celebrations of Cro-Magnon beer guzzlin' Americanism and all. So far my reaction is that we have here a brutal and therefore very good examination of the tribulations of the current butt-worshipping western rainbow pansy-culture in confronting the bullies of the global schoolyard. All well and good, although it must be said that Pat Buchanan has made the same points over and over again, and in simpler language and better organized paragraphs, in several of his books, particularly Where the Right Went Wrong, State of Emergency, The Death of the West, etc. Buchanan was a friend of the late Samuel Francis, whose career with the so-called conservative Washington Times was cut short by its so-called conservative editor, Wesley Prudden, almost immediately after the usual school of rainbow suckerfish began to bleat "racist" and "hater."

By the way, feel free to giggle at LBG's joke of the day: have you heard about the Trumpster's proposed vice-presidential choice, Newt Gingrich? The Great Paleoconservative Real Estate Mogul wants to run on a ticket with that sharp talkin' feller who, as Speaker of the House, guided the original NAFTA treaty through Congress, so that evvy one of those damn-blasted republican congressmen could "retire," mosey a few blocks over to K Street, and take a job helping the damn third world stick American manufacturing in a sack and carry it back to their monsoon-ridden paradises. And that includes Canada! Another Contract to Screw America?? Sign me up, Cool Papa!!

Never trust a man who willingly shares his name with a lizard.

If Trump were here I'd stick a commercial grade chrysanthemum rocket up his Lyin' Donald rear point of egress and see how far it could lift him off the ground before exploding his lyin' mop of fake hair all over the parade ground.

Happy Fourth of July to all you ridge runnin' manjacks and the wimmens what love them!!!